England Highlights
London
For a cosmopolitan city of 6.7 million people, London is quite parochial. Each neighbourhood, each street corner, is proud of its own identity. Central London is the shared London of all these groups and of 19 million visitors a year as well. Symbols of London - the Beefeaters, the bobbies, the cabbies, the cockneys, the pageantry, Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament - all are here, along with the stock market, motorcycle messengers and crawling traffic. The city contains many world-class museums and art galleries, ranging from the long-established but still fabulous Victoria & Albert Museum of decorative arts and the British Museum to Tate Modern, an inspirational gallery of modern art occupying a former power station on the south bank of the Thames. See also our online city guide to London.
Oxford
When Britain's noblest river passes through Oxford, it is not called the Thames as it is everywhere else. Instead it is called the Isis. Another river flows into it, the Cherwell (pronounced Charwell), and rising from the confluence of these muddy banks are the spires of that most mythologised of English cities.The city has given its name to many things from marmalade to movements, where undergraduates, cycling around corners, trail their gowns in the wind. But Oxford is also the site of the first Morris Motors works, and since World War II it has been an industrial city as much as an academic one.
The Cotswolds
The villages and towns of the Cotswolds are some of the prettiest in England, with creamy sandstone cottages and churches dating from the 18th century, when the region was enriched by its woollen industry. Bordered by Oxford in the east and Bath in the west, the area includes the idyllic towns of Burford, Broadway, Lechlade and Painswick, the important Roman town of Cirencester and in the north of the region, packed with rather too many antiques and olde-worlde tea shops, Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water.
Hardy Country
Wessex, in central southern England, was immortalised by the novelist Thomas Hardy. It is especially rich in history and its ancient monuments include Stonehenge. There is no hurry about Wessex. Its economy is largely agricultural, and industry, where it does raise its head, is discreet. Roads are generally minor and invariably go the long way round. There are great houses such as Longleat and Stourhead, and plenty of ruins. Dorset provides most of the coastline. To be lulled, go to Lyme Regis or Weymouth; to be threatened, go to Chesil Beach or Portland; to be overawed, go to the cliffs of Lulworth and Purbeck.
The West Country
The mystique of the West Country transcends its reputation as Britain's most popular holiday region. Beneath the Bristol Channel and Wales and on the edge of the moderating Atlantic, the peninsula is made up of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, rural counties with hidden fishing hamlets and Britain's warmest winter weather. History here takes on a romantic quality, with facts obscured by time and fictions embellished with tales of piracy, smuggling and shipwrecks. There's a certain island mentality here - in fact Cornwall itself is almost an island, with the River Tamar flowing along all but 5 miles (8 km) of the Devon border. But, in contrast, the Georgian city of Bath, near the vibrant port of Bristol, is cosmopolitan in character, with interesting shops, restaurants, bars and galleries packed into classical, sandstone buildings.
The Peak District
The Peak District is like a massive English rockery garden, 30 miles long and 20 miles at its widest point. The park begins in Derbyshire, extends north into Yorkshire, and offers rugged adventures to the inhabitants of half a dozen adjacent cities. Some of the summits in the Peak District National Park rise to 2,000 ft, attracting hang-gliders and providing rock climbing opportunities to suit novices and satisfy experts. Pot-holers, too, are drawn here.
Yorkshire & the North East
Long before Sunday-afternoon strollers trod Pennine millstone grit and mountain limestone, it was pounded by the feet of armies. The region's history is as turbulent as the sudden storms that rage on the high moors; no other part of England has more fortifications.
In AD 122, the Roman emperor Hadrian built a fortified wall for 73 miles across the country from sea to sea to keep back barbarian Scots. The Borders region, known as the "Debatable Lands" from the Middle Ages to Elizabethan times, was in a state of constant feuding. The Wars of the Roses (1455-85) saw the Houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose) locked in a struggle to win control of the throne. The Civil War in the 17th century divided local allegiances between king and parliament.
The Lake District
The Lake District in northwest England covers a small area, measuring scarcely more than 30 miles from north to south and 20 miles east to west. But as the poet William Wordsworth, who was born here at Cockermouth in 1770 and spent most of his life in the region, remarked: "I do not know any tract of country in which, within so narrow a compass, may be found an equal variety in the influences of light and shadow upon the sublime or beautiful features of landscape." The landscape is indeed beautiful, with the varied treasures of soft hills and woodland, the lengthy panoramas of the great lakes, the unexpected discoveries of the smaller waters or tarns, the bare contours of the fells and high ground and the awe-inspiring power of the more remote mountains and mountain passes.